Arthur Wesley Dow influenced Georgia O’Keeffe through design principles at Columbia University.
O’Keeffe studied with Dow’s teaching methods through courses at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she attended classes in 1914 and 1915. Dow emphasized the organized relationships of line, color, and tone rather than simply copying the visible world. Those ideas helped O’Keeffe move beyond the academic realism she had learned earlier.
She later taught art and used exercises based on simplified forms and expressive design. Her early abstract charcoal drawings, made in 1915, show how strongly this shift affected her work. Alfred Stieglitz exhibited those drawings in New York in 1916, helping launch her professional career.
William Merritt Chase was also an important teacher, but he represented an earlier stage of O’Keeffe’s training. Dow is the specific figure connected with the design philosophy that enabled her breakthrough into abstraction.